


A Sort of Man

by SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Affairs, Angst, Baskerville - Freeform, Bittersweet Ending, Did I say angst?, Eventual Johnlock, Greg Lestrade POV, Greg only internally a mess, Hand porn, I repeat: this is a SAD ending unless the Johnlock overpowers the sadness for you, I will warn you one last time of the bittersweet ending, Johnstrade, M/M, NOT A HAPPY ENDING FOR GREG LESTRADE, One Night Stand, One Shot, POV First Person, Pining, Post-Reichenbach, You Have Been Warned, john watson is a mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-28 09:36:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14446461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John/pseuds/SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John
Summary: I guess I'd always noticed his hands in the hazy periphery of my mind. . .





	A Sort of Man

**Author's Note:**

> If you know me at all, then you know that my journey into Johnstrade was inevitable. Please heed the tags and enjoy my first ever *actual* ficlet :)
> 
> Because I can't resist including some music. . . I gotta include my official 'Johnstrade OTP' song, which I listen to whenever I want to swoon over two strong, rough, tan pairs of hands dragging softly over sturdy skin, finding a little peace and solace in the big bad world. Comfort in the storm, and an exhale at the end of the long, hard fight.
> 
> Listen to "Maybe" by Janis Joplin [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM0T9fumD5k/)
> 
> *I rated this as Explicit, but I think it could also pass for Mature. You do you.

There was something about his hands.

That night sitting by the window in the reflection from the streetlamps. His steady fingers traced the lines of dripping condensation on the glass of his lukewarm pint. He licked a smear of white foam off his top lip with his tongue. I watched it for a moment before looking quickly away.

But his hands.

I guess I’d always noticed his hands in the hazy periphery of my mind. My ears always sharpened at the sound of his tan fingers steadily flipping through files at the Yard. I watched the veins in them pulse and bulge after a back-alley chase. When the suspect was already being led away in cuffs, and I fought that all-too-familiar sickening punch as I turned back towards the station, leaving the two of them shoulder-to-shoulder under the stars, arguing about dinner and forgetting my name.

And that’s the kind of man I was, I always told myself. The one who had a wife at home, and who walked back towards the squad car with his hands in the pockets of his suit, and who signed all the paperwork at the end of the day. I didn’t have time to hang back in a dark alley, and argue about food, and look at John Watson’s hands.

His hands.

I watched his hands clench by his sides that day in the stifling air of the church, the funeral where I’d offered to sit by his side and instead he said he wanted, he needed to sit alone. All alone on a pew meant for an entire extended family, looking invisible and small, and there had been a drop of rain clinging to the shoulder of his crisp, black suit.

I’d helped him out of that suit after, back in Baker Street with all the lights turned off, and Sherlock’s dressing gown still draped over the back of his black chair. I’d slid the jacket off his shoulders when I noticed his hands were shaking. And then I’d stood behind him, five steps away, as he sunk sideways against the doorframe to the kitchen, not able to stand anymore on just his legs. He’d wiped once at his face, I saw his shoulders twitch, and I’d noticed his hand came away wet. He hadn’t made a sound.

Two years and one month later, it seemed like John Watson hadn’t really made a noise since. 

We never talked about that night, when I’d stood behind him on creaking floorboards for what felt like hours, listening to him breathe and watching his hands come away wet from his face again and again. We never talked about whether he wished I’d moved closer.

 

We did talk about work, though, those few times a year when I got him to meet me for a pint, because that’s just the sort of man I was. The kind of men we were, only John Watson was just pretending. Soldiers didn’t talk about navigating workplace bureaucracy. Doctors on the front lines didn’t want to hear about a press conference gone good or bad. Madmen in dark alleys with guns in their steady hands, and brilliant smiles on their faces, didn’t want to hear about how I’d lost everything in the divorce. How I came home to her in our bed with another bloke – our own fucking bed - straight out of a shitty film. How my new flat only had one small room.

But he pretended so well, with such a high level of skill, nodding and smiling and acting along, that we talked about rugby and traffic and brands of beer as if he hadn’t called me one night, exactly one year and one month ago, and said nothing, except I could hear the naked noise of him crying.

I was Detective Inspector Lestrade, famed handler of Sherlock Holmes, and so we never talked about that night, how I’d crept out of bed where I hadn’t been asleep next to my wife, and tip-toed into the kitchen, and listened to his muffled sounds. Heard them wrench in wet gasps from his heaving voice, crackling with static through the phone. And when the sounds had finally faded, nearly a whole hour later, I’d tried to say, “John,” but he’d hung up right after the “J.”

I crawled back to bed that night, the one-year anniversary of receiving That Call about That Jump, and I had half-asleep sex with my wife still hearing John Watson’s stifled gasps in my head. I couldn’t get an erection, and she never came, but I still called it sex in my mind, because that’s the sort of man I was.

His hands grew tense on the sticky pub table, where we sat in the pools of light from the dirty streetlamps outside, and I looked up just in time to see half the Yard coming our way. It was the annual Holiday Party, and they wanted me to make the Toast.

I’d invited John to come with me, because I hadn’t seen his hands in nearly five months, and he hadn’t called me crying, not even in the middle of the night. I hadn’t invited his girlfriend Mary, who I’d never even met, and he hadn’t asked me if he could bring her along.

I stood up and cleared my throat and pushed back the flaps of my suit. I was the sort of man who chastised each person in the crowd one by one for my annual Holiday Party Toast, and told the stories of their biggest blunders at work from the previous year, and made fun of all the people who got divorced because of the job. I was the sort of man who had the crowd belly-laughing and rapt, on their feet and drunkenly cheering for more. 

Even John Watson took his tired hands off his pint to clap for me when my Toast was finally done, and we had all taken long swigs. His palms were wet from holding his glass.

When I sat back down, the entire room left me alone. I was not the sort of man who was invited to “Come over, Lestrade, and join our table – let us buy you a pint!” 

I sat alone with John Watson, who sat alone with his full glass of beer in his hands.

“Do you still smoke?” he suddenly asked me. It was the first thing he’d said since he arrived and said my last name.

“Quit before the divorce,” I said, over the din of the party. “Part of our counseling - wife said it was one of her new ‘non-negotiables’. My non-negotiable was don’t fucking sleep with someone else in our own goddamn bed - find some other fucking place to do it - so it looks like I came out the only victor from that competition.”

John didn’t laugh at my poor joke, and he looked up at me with blank eyes. They looked black in the dim light from the crowded pub. I couldn’t remember the last time they’d looked truly blue. Maybe Mary knew.

“Do you have any on you?” he asked.

I looked at the faint scar on his finger from holding his gun. It should have been much more faded than it was. I patted the full breast pocket of my jacket. “Of course,” I said with that special grin I knew I could do. He was up and walking out before I’d even finished saying the words.

The pub backed up to a thin walkway along the Thames – one I’d spent years of my early career staking out for arrests. The other Yarders noticed me walking out the back, and they called out, “Oi, Lestrade, leaving so soon?” and “Word is you promised to buy us all a pint!” and “Went back on the smokes since you got rid of that wife, eh?” 

I smiled and called them all bastards and cunts as I wound my way through. They called me a wanker, but nobody asked me to stay. That’s not the sort of man I was. They didn’t even notice John had also passed through the crowd.

I followed him out to the railing overlooking the freezing river. It was too cold to be standing outside in just suits, but neither one of us wore a jacket. That would have made it seem too real that we had just left the party, and that we’d left together. Our feet crunched through the thin ice on the stone ground, and the muffled sounds of the pub shut away behind the thudding door.

I joined him leaning against the metal railing in the sharp wind; it rustled through styled strands of greying hair.

I looked at John once before pulling the half-empty pack out of my pocket; the starlight made his face look ashen and old. My fingers were already growing numb from the cold, and they fumbled once on the lighter as I held it up to my lips. The first inhale exploded through my body in crackling warmth and longing. I inhaled and exhaled so slowly I thought I would pass out, and I noticed that John was quietly watching the trail of smoke with parted lips.

“Fancy one?” I asked, holding out the pack, but he shook his head quickly no, and looked back out over the churning water. I realized he was taking in deep breaths through his nose, purposefully smelling the smoke, and it hit me that he must have been thinking of him, remembering the way he must have smelled after --

“I’m going to ask her to marry me,” he said in the fog. 

The cigarette froze halfway to my mouth. “Mary?”

He just nodded. His face looked like he just told me he was about to die - the way the first responders told me it had looked when they first reached him on the pavement, where he had collapsed on his knees with his hand clutching the corner of Sherlock’s coat. Before I could get there to bundle him away forcefully into my car. 

His gentle hands that day had been covered in blood, and when I’d taken him into an empty public loo back at the Yard, and shoved up the sleeves of his jacket to wash off his hands, I remembered that it had been the first time I’d ever seen his bare forearms or wrists. I’d washed his hands in the echoing bathroom until the cold tap water ran clear, thick with the sharp stench of blood, and he hadn’t made a sound.

He didn’t make a sound looking out over the Thames either. I took another long drag to fill the silence. I had to say something about the wedding. His wedding.

“Well, I’m . . .” 

I paused. I realized I couldn’t decide whether to say “I’m happy for you” or “I’m sorry.” The sort of man I was would easily say the first thing, then reach over and thump John kindly on the back. Maybe tell him to come get out of the freezing bloody cold and buy him a drink to celebrate. Tell him that he’s a lucky man.

But standing there clutching the railing and shivering from the ice, in a too-large suit he hadn’t worn in years, John Watson looked nothing like a lucky man, and I could still smell the metallic tang of the long-ago blood dripping from the tips of his stunned fingers.

“I think she already knows,” he said to the water before I could finish, as if I hadn’t even said a word. “She’ll want a spring wedding. Probably not for another year - you know, with all the planning. Saving up money.”

I couldn’t look away from him. His hands shook slightly in the cold, and he pulled one of his jacket sleeves further down over his wrist.

“I do know,” I said.

He tilted his head and grimaced. “Right, of course. Yeah.”

There was a small silence - one where I stood there and wondered what sort of man I was that I was desperately sad at hearing my best friend was getting married. And what sort of man I was for thinking that John Watson was even my best friend, when they only times I’d ever spent time with him outside of three-times-a-year drinks at a pub were watching him cry, or washing blood off his clenching hands. Watching him happily walk away from me to go home with another man; case completed, gazes locked, let Lestrade tie up the loose ends before he goes home to a wife that probably won’t even be there.

John cleared his throat softly. “We slept together,” he said.

I dropped my cigarette. It disappeared in the black tide.

The faint buzz of alcohol still running through my veins made me want to grab the front of John Watson’s perfectly pressed, too-large suit and demand, “ _Who is we? You and her? You and him?_ ”

_You and me?_

Because any one of those three options would have been true. Or, at least, the first and the third, based on what I knew.

Baskerville. 

I wondered if I was the only one remembering it as we stared down at the endless water rushing by.

Every beat. Every detail. As if it wasn’t years ago, as if it was only --

John Watson knocked on my door in that little Baskerville inn past midnight, barging in and immediately fuming about Sherlock bloody Holmes. I sat down on the edge of my too-small bed, in my boxers and an old Academy shirt, and I watched him pace and clench his tan fists and wipe his strong hand over his cursing mouth. I listened to him without hearing a single word. “Sherlock this” and “Bastard that” and “Bloody machine” and “What about me?”

I heard that part. 

“You _are_ his best friend, Watson,” I cut in. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t call him John. “You know him, he just . . . he’s probably flipping his lid over not understanding this bloody case with the dog. Has nothing to do with you. Come on, I mean, look at you, you’re --”

I stopped and flung my hand up in the air. “You know. . .” I finished lamely, barely speaking. I looked down at the carpet, and at my own hands. My hands looked old and worn, with wrinkles starting to form over the skin. Nothing like his capable, steady, tanned --

“I’m what?” John asked softly. I looked up at the odd tone of his voice. Somehow too sharp, too crystal thin.

His eyes were incredibly, wondrously blue. 

My exhale sounded too loud. I was suddenly sharply conscious of the fact that I was in my thin boxers, and I wondered if he minded that my hair was so grey. I sucked in my small stomach, hated myself, then let it back out.

“Of course you’re his best friend,” I said again, too soft. 

Somehow, I was no longer sitting on the bed. I was standing, and John Watson’s soft eyebrows were raised, and he was looking at me with parted lips. 

He stepped closer to me, and the wooden floor of the old inn creaked. “Yeah?” he breathed.

My heart raced in my throat. I knew that I was the kind of man who would sit back down at that point, and ask him more about Sherlock bloody Holmes, and tell him I was supposed to text my wife to let her know I’d made it to the inn ok. To ask her if she was missing me at home. Words straight off a script. 

I was the sort of man who did not lick his lips while glancing at John Watson’s warm hands in the glow of the inn lamp, hanging down by his sides and peeking out from his usual long sleeves.

I took a step closer and looked down into his eyes. They looked like moving water. 

“Yeah,” I said back, and then his hands were on either side of my face. He looked up at me, and I wondered if he was used to looking up at people’s faces which he held in his hands. If the two of them had ever --

He kissed me.

For a moment, it was slow. His hands were so much softer than they looked on my cheeks and jaw. His fingertips tickled my recently-cut hair. His mouth rested on mine, just rested, and we breathed. He tasted like sharp bursts of whiskey and wool. 

I didn’t touch him, and my hands hung uselessly at my sides. 

John was . . . John Watson was -- 

He took a step closer, pressed along my body from thigh to chest, and he traced his upper lip slowly across my own. He was hot and wet and fire along my chest. His soft palms were starting to sweat.

And as he moved his lips across my own, and rolled his tongue to barely taste my skin, I suddenly became conscious of the wet sound of our mouths moving together, and without meaning to, I growled low in my throat.

It wasn’t slow after that. 

By the time I had him pressed up against the wall he was panting out curses, and his muscled hands grabbed hard at the backs of my thighs. He grunted and yanked my shirt off up over my head, and he touched and touched and touched the thick hair over my chest with his hands.

Those hands. 

They covered every inch of my burning skin. Flamed up my sides and the small of my back, traced the lines of my stomach, counted the ribs. Capable, indexing, assured fingertips. Fingertips which I would one day wash until the red water ran clear –

My chest. He rubbed his face and cheek against it, and licked it with his tongue, and scratched his nails across my skin. His perfectly trimmed nails.

It didn’t matter to me at all that he still had all his layers of clothes on; that all I could see was his neck and his palms. I grabbed fistfuls of his silken hair, feeling the wiry hidden strands of grey. I gasped hot air into his open mouth, across his swollen wet lips, and licked down his throat.

“God,” he said when I forced open the shaking zipper of his trousers and shoved my hand down inside. I grasped him in my palm. He felt like hot steel. Thick.

I was touching him with my bare hand. . . holding John Watson’s --

“God,” he said again when I stroked him. “Christ.”

He said all the names of the deities. All of them except my own.

He said a lot of things to me as I moved my hand over his skin, and all that time I couldn’t breathe to say anything back. He cursed and begged me, spewed utter filth in my ear as he licked the skin, bit along my jaw, fucked into my hand. 

There was sweat on his flushed face. He was incomparably beautiful.

I accidentally felt the outline of his scar through his jumper, and he tensed. I moved my hand down to his gasping ribs. I realized that I wanted to kiss the man or woman who had found his bleeding body and carried him out of the sand. I wanted to thank them, look them in the eye and say “ _thank god, oh thank god._ ”

And I wondered, did Sherlock ever want to find that man or woman? Did he want to look them in the eye, and thank them for carrying John Watson’s limp body? Did he also want to grab their face in his long hands and kiss --

I grabbed the back of John’s neck and leaned down to kiss him instead. His cries grew higher and more desperate, his voice more wrecked. He was dripping onto my fingers where I stroked him in his pants.

A man like me did not kiss someone in an intimate place in the middle of an encounter like this. Only harsh lips and mouths and teeth. Nothing soft.

But still, I leaned forward and kissed the base of his neck, right at the collar of his shirt with slow, careful lips. I caressed his skin with my mouth, and whispered his name with my tongue, and kissed him again, and again, and tasted –

At my touch I felt him release over my hand inside his pants. He was silent. His chest shook against me, and I knew that my hands on him were suddenly too soft. Too gentle.

I knew that I was the sort of man who did not expect the favor to be returned.

I pulled away to go and wash off my hand, trying to hide the fact that I was tenting my boxers, when he grabbed my shoulders and swung me around hard into the wall.

“Think you’re getting away without me seeing your cock?” he growled. My head fell back against the wallpaper. I was aching. I felt myself grow even harder at his rough voice.

Cold air rushed against my skin when he ripped my boxers down my legs. I heard him sink to his knees on the old wood. I was naked, and erect, and I looked down just in time to see John Watson’s mouth opening wide to take me in.

My hand rushed to his hair, and a weak sound left my chest when I felt the pressure of his tongue. I couldn’t remember the last time my wife had ever given me a blow job. Years, and years, and it had been nearly thirty fucking years since I’d looked down and seen a man’s head bobbing between my legs. 

Those hands were on my calves and thighs tracing backwards against my hair. I could feel the calluses of his palms - the dangerous, rough strength, the wet heat from his mouth as he sucked, and licked, and his tongue vibrated against my skin. As he looked up once at me with heavy-lidded navy eyes. As he grasped my cock in his wonderful hand to stroke. As he moaned --

My toes curled against the floor. I thought, in that moment, of meeting John Watson for the very first time on those spiral stairs. The confusion in his blue eyes, the way the police lights had flickered through his hair, the sadness of his small hand gripping the cane. His voice.

The military strength in the set of his strong shoulders. His bottom lip.

The knowing look in Sherlock’s eyes when his gaze met mine over John’s head. He had known, right then. Had seen it all written clearly across my face. Before I even fully realized. And now, and now --

I was gasping as he sucked me, trying not to yank his hair. I could hear his tongue licking me, and there was spit on his chin.

“John,” I heard myself moan. His hands cupped my balls, rolled them in his beautiful palm. I wanted to taste the skin there, trace the lines of his wrinkles with my tongue. Suck his fingers down my throat. Tell him. . . tell him that. . .

“Christ, I’ve wanted you --”

It took me a full second to realize he’d stopped. I looked down at a set of tense shoulders. A mouth slowly sliding off my skin, leaving it glistening and pink.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he whispered to the carpet. 

My insides turned cold. “What --”

“Christ, you’re married,” he said as he rubbed a hand over his mouth and face. He shoved himself to his feet and stumbled away from me where I leaned back naked against the wall. I was still half-hard, pathetically drooping towards the floor.

“It’s alright,” I said in a cracking voice. I was frantic. “She just . . . she’s done it before, too. It’s alright --”

“I’m so sorry,” he said, not looking at my eyes. He yanked up his zipper and re-did his belt with shaking hands. He stumbled towards the door. “I shouldn’t have . . . Fuck, I’m so sorry.”

“No,” I called out when his hand reached the door. He looked back at me over his shoulder, straight at my naked stomach instead of up at my face. Reflexively I covered my softening, wet cock with my hand. Wet from his spit.

“John, please,” I said. I knew I was begging.

His eyes as they stared at my naked body were filled with hot shame. Guilt and regret.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, and he shut the door too quietly behind him.

The next morning, down at breakfast in the dining room of the inn, Sherlock walked in, took one look at me, and knew. I waited for his face to be shocked or angry, and instead all I saw was pity, turning down the corner of his mouth. It made me feel ill. I looked away from it too quickly.

I stared down at my weak coffee, and I wondered if Sherlock also knew that I hadn’t gotten a chance to come. That I never got to orgasm with John Watson in the same room.

When John came down a few minutes later, he blushed deep red at the sight of me. The guilt and shame were still there. Regret mixed with overwhelming embarrassment and resolve. He sat down next to Sherlock across the room from where I stood and angrily wolfed down a plate of eggs, avoiding my eyes.

Later, out in the gravel, he reached out to almost touch my arm. “Greg,” he said. He hadn’t said my name at all last night. “Listen, Christ, I’m so, so --”

“Don’t worry about it, Watson,” I said, because that was the sort of man I was, and because I couldn’t bear to hear him apologize for kissing me one more time. I shook my head. “Any bloke would be pissed as hell at that one over there for the stunt he pulled last night,” I said, glancing at Sherlock’s back. “Just . . . you know, just a drunken mistake. Just . . . a night. You’re alright.”

We both knew, there in the blasting sunlight of the bright day, that neither of us had been anywhere close to drunk the night before. But John nodded at what I said, because Detective Inspector Lestrade was the sort of man who knew that all his friends made silly mistakes, and he wasn’t one to hold a grudge, or be rattled by something as blasé as an innocent fling. Just mouths on skin. A way to feel good and forget. (A way to remember).

And Sherlock bloody Holmes could drive anyone to do something insane. Something ridiculous, that they would never otherwise want to do.

John gave me an odd look, one that looked remarkably similar to the look on Sherlock’s face ten minutes ago back inside. It made me want to vomit up the cup of black coffee I’d gulped down. I knew he was remembering the words I’d said. What I’d gasped when his head had been in between my legs. 

“Right,” he said. “Yeah, alright.” 

Sherlock yelled his name from a distance to get a move on. “Well,” he said again, starting to walk away. His face was an apology in itself.

“Cheers,” I said, and gave him a flat grin. I pulled my shades down over my eyes. “Make him call me when you get any leads before you run off and do something stupid,” I said, because that’s the sort of thing that a man like me would say.

I blinked. 

I was standing in the freezing cold overlooking the Thames in the dark. John Watson was standing by my side, so close that the fabric of our suit jacket sleeves brushed. 

Sherlock Holmes was dead.

“ _We slept together_ ” is what John Watson had said, this version of John Watson, less than five seconds ago.

I took a deep, silent breath and tasted the leftover smoke on my tongue. “You and . . “

“Sherlock,” he said. The name sounded broken as it fell out of his mouth in pieces. It tumbled down into the river and disappeared.

Our breaths fogged together. My knuckles were turning white from gripping the metal rail.

I was not the sort of man who talked about dead ex-lovers at a holiday party with the man I’d adored for years at a professional distance. The same man who’d once dropped to his knees at one in the morning, and then walked away from me while I was still hard.

“So, the two of you were . . .”

“No, not like that,” he said. The words came out very slow. I wondered if he noticed that the edges of our pinky fingers were touching on the railing. Probably not. His skin was remarkably warm.

“We just. . . slept. In the same bed. I don’t even remember how it started, really. Sometime after that first incident at the pool. You know.”

Before Baskerville, then.

The realization flooded through me, turning what little warmth I still had in my bones to ice. John had kissed me, tasted me, let me push him up against the wall in a mad frenzy. And then he’d gone back to a hotel room to sleep by Sherlock Holmes’ side while my erection turned soft – the hardest one I’d ever had in years. Maybe they’d curled up together. Maybe Sherlock had slept with his head on John’s chest.

And Sherlock would have known, immediately, from the second John walked in that room door. He knew, and then he saw me in the morning with that desperate look of pity, right before he cleared his face and loudly said, “Good morning, Gavin. Your tan is atrocious and makes you look like a dried apple. Be prepared for my call this afternoon,” before striding away to watch John stare down at the table and eat his eggs. 

All that time, every damn call and every case, they had both looked at me and known. Known _together_. Looked at me commanding a whole team of Yarders, catching murderers and thieves, winning service awards, standing up at the podium with the microphone in my face. Looked at me be married and cheated on by my wife. Looked at me roll my eyes at Sherlock Holmes, and run to John Watson’s aid at the end of a chase, and arrive at all hours knocking on their door for help on a case.

And all that time, they had both known that I was just a fool for John Watson. Probably whispered about it in pitiful voices when they were side by side in bed.

John went on, speaking to the water. I wondered if he was aware that I was even having conscious thoughts beside him.

“When I stay over at Mary’s place, it’s alright now. I can . . . you know. I can sleep. But when I’m back there, in the flat. . .” 

His breath shook, and his hand that was touching mine lifted up to wipe his face. The fingertip came away glittering wet beneath the stars. He put his hand back down on the railing, half-covering my own, and I could feel the wetness from his finger drip down onto my skin.

“When I sleep there I can hardly stand it,” he said in a broken voice. I had to strain my ears to hear him. “Even after all this time. I reach for him in the dark when I wake up. And he’s . . . and the sheets are just cold. I . . . we never even kissed. Not even once. But I . . I shared his bed. He shared his whole life with me. His work, his home, his friends. His fucking money and his brother and his violin. Everything. And he . . . all he wanted was to sleep with me at night. That’s all he ever asked me to do.”

His hand squeezed mine, and I turned my palm up to grasp his fingers. I held on so tightly I felt his bones creak. 

“John . . .” I tried to say, but he kept talking in a rush. “And now, I . . . there are so many nights I don’t want to be at Mary’s. I want to . . stay, with all of his things, and his chair. And be there where he . . was. But when I try to sleep I lie there and I just think . . . I wish I had somewhere to go. I want somewhere else to go. Anywhere but that bed --”

His voice gave out before he could finish, and my chest ached as I stared resolutely out at the water, listening to him try to breathe by my side. “I don’t have anywhere else to go,” he whispered again in a wet voice.

We were still holding hands. 

I had heard John Watson cry before in my life, over a cell phone through static in the middle of the night. I had seen it from behind, the quiet shaking of his shoulders. But I had never seen it like that, head on, with nowhere to hide. 

He pulled his hand out of my grasp.

My face started to burn. It felt like the most intimate thing I’d ever seen, his golden hair bowed forward in the moonlight, and his hands over his face. He was trying to hide the sounds escaping from his throat, and I watched as tears fell onto the dirty, icy ground. 

Detective Inspector Lestrade, ex-handler of Sherlock Holmes, would have stood a careful five steps behind John Watson. He would have looked away from the quiet man in an old suit, weeping in the dark by the river behind the pub, and he would have waited until he quieted, until he was done. He would have given his back a pat, found him a handkerchief, and said, “Alright, mate. You’re alright. Good to let it out, you know. We all do. You’re alright.” 

But I . . .I was not that sort of man.

Instead I took a step towards his side and reached out a hand. I tried not to notice how gruff and common my fingers looked against the fine fabric of his jacket. His shoulder twitched below my fingers when I relaxed my palm on his shoulder. I let the tips of my fingers rest on the skin of his neck. 

For one blinding moment, everything was silent. John’s breaths, and the noisy hum of the pub, and the honking of the city. The rush of icy water. None of it made a sound.

Then he leaned back into me and let me bring my arm around the front of his chest. His hand reached up and gripped the sleeve of my suit jacket so tightly I could feel the fabric wrinkling from the heat. His hand looked strong and beautiful under the stars. 

I imagined those gripping fingers reaching into an open, bleeding wound. Covered in gunpowder from a midnight shot. Wound through Sherlock Holmes’ curls.

I remembered them caressing the skin of my stomach. Running through the hair covering my chest. Stroking my cock.

It turned out, standing there in the moonlight by the water, that I was the sort of man who pressed my cheek down into his hair. I breathed deeply and closed my eyes as I held him from behind. His hair smelled like stale beer from the inside of the pub, covering over his mild shampoo, and a hint of Earl Grey. I rubbed my freezing thumb over his chest through his thin shirt, and slowly wrapped my other arm low around his waist. 

He let me hold him in the dark, and he didn’t try to be quiet anymore.

After a long time, when the space between our bodies had grown warm, I lifted my cheek and pressed my lips into his hair. One single kiss. The one he never had with Sherlock Holmes. 

“How is it you always know what you want?” John suddenly asked. His voice was damp and exhausted.

I frowned, even though he couldn’t see me. “I don’t –”

“You do, though. Your career, your friends – divorcing your wife. Your new place. You just . . . see what you need from life and you take it.”

I was taking it right then. I was pressing my cheek into John Watson’s hair. I was feeling his heartbeat through his shirt, the warmth of his sturdy back –

“And I . . .” he went on. His voice was choked and rough, and his hand moved from gripping my arm to holding my hand. “I don’t even want to ask my future wife to marry me. Don’t want to sleep at her place. And then, when I’m home, I want to be anywhere but there. Anywhere but the bed where he . . . where we –”

“Come home with me,” I said.

We both held our breath. For a moment, all that existed was the press of his fingers against my own.

Then his body tensed in my arms. I released him slowly, trailing across the fabric of his suit with my hands, and let him take a step away from me. When he turned towards me in the moonlight, his clothes were rumpled and out of place. His eyes were still swollen and wet, shining a fierce, incomprehensible blue. 

I couldn’t read his face, and so I kept talking. I was breathing hard. “You do have somewhere else to go, John,” I said. “You don’t have to – you can come home with me. Stay with me. Any time . . .”

For a breathtaking moment, there had been relief on his face. I’d thought he was going to walk back into my arms and nod yes. That he would thank me, and touch me with his cold hands, and follow me home with the sleeves of our jackets brushing together.

We were standing close enough that I could taste the breath from his lips. I knew that he could also taste mine. He breathed in deeply once through his nose, tasting my exhale down his throat, and he slowly licked his lips as his eyes closed on a long blink, and I thought. . . I thought that he was about to lean forward. . . and I didn’t even care if he pretended that I was --

Then his face changed. The pity crept in. He could see that the look on my face was too desperate, my ever-calm, unperturbed, ‘no-nonsense’ face, and it was breaking for John Watson, cracking open to show him the sort of man I actually was.

A sort of man who still wanted him when he was grieving Sherlock Holmes.

“Just to sleep. . .” I said, trailing off and hating myself immediately.

He looked at me with soft eyes for another long moment. I wanted to beg him to keep his mouth shut, to not make me have to hear it, but he spoke anyway, in a voice that sounded like Dr. John Watson.

“Right, I . . thanks,” he said in a fresh voice. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

It was all over. 

Sherlock Holmes was dead, and John Watson wished he didn’t have to sleep in an empty bed with a ghost, and I had lost.

I was the sort of man who gambled everything I owned and lost. Behind a dirty pub without a jacket in the cold.

We stared at each other, and I somehow managed to say, “Of course.”

I didn’t call out “no” when he nodded his head back towards the door. “Should get going,” he said calmly. “Mary said she’d wait up for me at hers.”

I was suddenly sharply aware that I was going home to an empty flat. That I wouldn’t even have my wife there to roll over and pull back the sheets, even if she smelled faintly of the cologne from another man. 

“Thanks for coming out,” I said, as if I’d invited John Watson to my own birthday party outside by the freezing river. As if there had been cake and balloons, and no one had cried.

His mouth twitched, just once, and then he walked back towards the door.

I immediately turned and looked back out over the water. I gripped the handrail with numb fingers, and I thought of nothing at all. The report still waiting on my desk to be signed, the amount of my staff who would be late to work tomorrow with their hangovers, what rugby match might be on when I got back home.

The sort of things a man like me might think about when he’s tipsy and smoking alone outside the Holiday Party.

I jumped when I felt a hand on my side from behind. It suddenly dawned on me I hadn’t heard the pub door open and close. I looked down and held my breath as the hand moved slowly up towards my chest, a steady palm finally resting straight over my heart. Body heat raced up my cold back.

I turned my head to look over my shoulder, but I couldn’t see John Watson standing behind me. I could just feel him, and see the intricate skin and tendon and bone that made up his hand, currently settled over the racing blood in my chest. 

His hand stroked me, just once. I realized that it was saying goodbye. 

I was the sort of man who didn’t say anything at all, who didn’t sink to my knees and beg, as John kissed the back of my shoulder through my suit. He held his cheek there against my shoulder blade and spine for nearly a minute. I didn’t reach up to touch his hand, and I didn’t close my eyes.

When he walked away again, quietly disappearing into the fog, I knew that I was the sort of man who could not turn to watch him walk away. The blast of noise from the pub when he opened the door hurt my ears.

-

Nine months later I called Sherlock Holmes a bastard as I clutched him to my chest. He eventually hugged me back. One week after that I was at a crime scene calling orders, and I looked up just in time to see John Watson bending under the yellow tape for the first time in three years. 

And for the first time in three years, Sherlock Holmes was behind him.

It was the first time I’d seen John Watson since his hand slipped off my chest in the fog.

“Lestrade,” he said walking up to my side, as Sherlock sprinted off in search of the body without a hello. John was beaming, smiling in a perfectly tailored suit. I wondered if they had been somewhere special when my team gave Sherlock a call.

His eyes were shining blue.

“Watson,” I said, just as Sherlock yelled out, “John!”

“Better run,” he said, rolling his eyes and looking towards the house.

I nodded. “Cheers. Keep an eye on him – no licking any evidence,” I said. He smiled at me, a huge warm smile that seemed to make the noise of an entire orchestra on his face. He reached out and put one of his hands on my forearm. When I looked down, I noticed that the scar from his gun had faded away.

And then he was off, jogging to catch up with Sherlock Holmes. I watched him run away, and the patch on my arm felt icy cold. 

I was the sort of man who went back to my flat after wrapping up a case, when all the paperwork had been signed, and the correct people were behind bars. After I had waved at John Watson leaving the scene by Sherlock’s side, when I hadn’t been able to look away from the way their feet fell in perfect sync.

Sherlock had been holding his hand, nearly hidden by the fabric of his coat. I wondered if he knew how that palm felt across the hair on his chest. 

I wondered what had happened to Mary.

I was the sort of man who took the last beer out of his fridge the second he got home, and ate leftover pasta from the day before, and set out his shirt to be ironed for tomorrow morning. 

The rugby match was a repeat of one I’d already seen last week. 

I was the sort of man who had a quick wank in the small shower, mixing my semen with the soap on the white tile floor. Who didn’t make a sound when he came. Who wore thin boxers and an old Academy shirt to bed. 

And I wondered, lying there staring up at the ceiling in the dark, what the hell kind of man I was to be still awake after such an exhausting day. To be lying there thinking that the worst thing to ever happen to me was Sherlock Holmes not dying just to save my life.

To save John Watson’s life. Make up for his fake blood spilled over John’s hands. Fake blood I had washed off in an echoing public sink.

I texted Sherlock at three o’clock in the morning. Past caring.

‘ _Take care of him_ ,’ I typed out. It made me furious to hit ‘send.’ Furious and breathtakingly alone.

He would be safer in my arms. He would fit better curled up against my broader chest. He would stay warm pressed against my thighs –

But what sort of man was I that I wanted to rip John Watson away from Sherlock Holmes? Drive over to their flat and fling myself physically in between them in their bed? Ask Sherlock to be dead again? To pour his real blood all over John Watson’s hands?

‘ _Thank you_ ,’ he texted me back immediately. My phone screen was too bright in the dark, empty room.

I wondered what exactly he was thanking me for. For holding John Watson by the river as he wept, or for taking off the jacket of his funeral suit, or for answering the phone in the middle of the night. For still caring.

For kissing him and making him orgasm with my hand.

My chest felt too tight. I suddenly missed him with a desperation I had never felt before. One that I now fully realized would never be resolved. I wanted to ask Sherlock if he was keeping John’s hands warm in their bed. If he’d let John finally have his kiss. And I wondered what fucking sort of man I was that I was even thinking about –

‘ _You’re a good man_ ,’ he suddenly texted me, reading my mind from halfway across London.

‘ _Bastard_ ,’ I sent back.

I was the sort of man who rolled over to try and sleep without dark thoughts of how he held Sherlock close in their bed as they slept. The sort of man who would probably see them again tomorrow, and argue with Sherlock Holmes over boundaries and procedure, and smile and say, “Watson,” as they both walked up, fresh for the case.

I wanted to be the sort of man who won, in the end, just like John said. With my job and my house and my divorce.

But I had lost.

I had lost, because Sherlock Holmes was alive, and because he saved my life.

Because he was the only one who ever got to taste the skin of John’s hands.

I closed my eyes and tried to drift off to sleep on my side. My hands were folded under my head.

Eventually, just as the fog of dreams settled over my body, my hand slowly moved until it settled over my heart on my chest– the place where his fingers had said goodbye to me behind the pub. I kept my eyes closed so I didn’t have to see how sad it looked. I fell asleep curled up, surrounded by half an empty bed. 

I had a full day of work tomorrow, and I had forgotten to iron my shirt.

There would always be something about his goddamn hands.

**Author's Note:**

> Now go find some filthy hot smut or some sugary sweet fluff to recover!
> 
> Writing this was ridiculously fun. I've always wanted to challenge myself and stretch my writing skills to write something shorter than 10k words. I've also wanted to write fully realized Johnstrade (well, at least, explicit Johnstrade) forever now, and so I took a small break from the next Bluest of Blue chapter to fully indulge my fantasy. If you want to read John and Greg together with a happy ending, know that my upcoming fic after my current WIPs are finished will be Johnlockstrade OTP! With a heavy, heavy, heavy dose of Johnstrade. And a love-filled ending. Oh, these two. . .
> 
> I would LOVE to hear your thoughts in the comments below! I know I haven't been responding to every comment on my current long WIPs, but comments on this lil' guy will definitely get a reply. I just want to talk to everyone about Gregory fucking Lestrade looking at John Watson's perfect hands. It is the only truth that exists on this wide earth.
> 
> Thank you SO much for reading!


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